Promotion Tip:
Avoid Broken Backlinks

by Larisa Thomason,
Senior Web Analyst,
NetMechanic, Inc.

Broken links. The Web is full of them and they damage Web site credibility. On your site, they irritate visitors and look unprofessional. But broken links to your site (called backlinks) can hurt you too. The time you spend building link popularity is wasted if external sites link to pages that you've moved, deleted, or renamed.

Deep Linking Opens Doors

A high link popularity score helps your search engine rank and draws new visitors to your site. You want to encourage many different sites to link to as many different internal pages as possible. It's the same strategy as deep submitting your pages to search engines.

Also, most webmasters prefer to link directly to internal pages anyway because those links send visitors directly to useful information.

Imagine you have a site devoted to quarter horses. On your horse nutrition page, you recommend a certain brand of horse feed called "Bob's Wonder Chow." The webmaster for Bob's Wonder Chow would probably be happy to link to that particular internal page because it praises the product. He/she might be less inclined to link only to your home page - unless you're praising the Wonder Chow there too!

That's ok because each external link is like another door into your site. But be careful you aren't slamming those doors by changing file names or moving them around.

Avoid Broken Backlinks

You could be closing at least one door each time you change a file name, move it to a different directory, or delete an existing file. Those actions create a broken link on every external site that links to the particular page you changed. Visitors to those sites won't be able to follow the link to a working page on your site.

This is bad for two reasons:

Either way, you garner ill will from both parties!

Check Before You Change

But of course, you do sometimes need to move a file, delete old information, or change a file name to remove spaces or make it more descriptive. Check the backlinks first though to see how many external sites link to that particular page. If it's a lot, you may want to leave it alone. If it's just a few, contact the webmasters of the referring sites and notify them of the change so they can update their sites.

You can use Page Primer, part of Search Engine Power Pack, to check the link popularity of each page in your site. It gives you an aggregate number of how many other sites link to each page (along with lots of engine-specific tips to help improve your link popularity score and overall search engine rank).

The link total is a quick check to help you decide whether to leave the file alone or proceed with the change. For instance, Page Primer reports that 18,851 other sites link to our NetMechanic newsletter index page. There's not much chance we'll ever change the name of that one!

If you do decide to make a change, many search engines will give you a list of the page's backlinks. Use this shortcut in the search box (inserting your own URL and file name):

So if we wanted to see who is linking to a previous newsletter story on email spiders, we would enter this:

It has a backlink total of 44 on Google and 37 on Lycos. That would be quite manageable if we every wanted to move the file or change its name.

Consider how difficult it can be to put together a successful link popularity campaign. Then think about how easy it is to sabotage that success just by updating your site! Check your backlinks before you make changes. It protects your reputation with other webmasters and keeps your visitors happy.